


The Glass Room

by vyatka



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Gen, Hotels, Light Angst, Self-Hatred, Self-Reflection, this is not my best work i'm not gonna lie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-06
Updated: 2018-09-06
Packaged: 2019-07-07 14:24:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,683
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15910053
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vyatka/pseuds/vyatka
Summary: The Soldier learned decades ago that "real" is a nebulous term.





	The Glass Room

Bucky doesn't know much about himself, but he's catching onto the fact that his skull has the density of the average sledgehammer. It is a quality he respects in other people, but resents in himself. No wonder they needed electricity to control his mind. Nothing else could have made a dent. 

Example: when he comes into the hotel and out of the rain, he asks for a room. 

The man at the desk says: "Sorry. The glass room's the only thing available. Might want to try another place." 

Bucky, being of thick skull and parakeet wit - "I'll take it. Please." 

He reads facial expressions poorly, but even he can recognize dubiousness when he sees it. Pulled up eyebrows. Mouth twisted into a grimace. Tongue paused in the side of the cheek. It should make him hesitate, but he blunders on, hungry and dripping. "Please? I can pay." 

"Glass room's free, buddy." 

Bucky (retired assassin, professional imbecile: nods quickly. His eyes are guileless, poor sweet thing. "I want it." 

"It's a new moon, guy." The man at the desk has not yet fathomed the depths of dumb - or maybe just uninformed - that is James Barnes. "Either you have the biggest balls I've ever seen, or you just hate yourself." 

Both true, depending on how you want to look at it. And who you are asking. 

Bucky stares at him, and maybe it's the sad, uncomprehending, wet-cat impression he gives off, or else he just gets impatient, because the desk guy shrugs, says "Hey, it's your head," and hands over a little glass key. "Hope you do okay, man." 

Bucky is dismissive. He survives everything. At least, he has so far. 

 ***

He reaches the room still rain-soaked and road-muddy. He grimaces. He hates being unclean. When he was a little kid, he loved taking his shoes off to wade through puddles, but screeched like the devil when his mother tried to put them back on his muddy feet. The thought of having muddy feet inside of his socks was, at the age of five, the worst thing he could possibly imagine. 

Of course, as he'd gotten older, the worst thing he could possibly imagine had evolved. Wet socks on muddy feet became vegetables became kidnapping became public humiliation became starvation became German soldiers became death became  _not_ dying became ice, and then, well, the list had lengthened until, like a rubber band, it snapped. When you fear everything, you fear nothing, and the Winter Soldier feared nothing. The Winter Soldier loved nothing, either. Or if he did, it was an animal's kind of love. Conditional, possessive, fleeting, and far secondary to other things. 

He strips off his shirt and then his pants, takes a scratchy towel from the bathroom to rub at his skin. His shiver reflex is come-and-go, so, like a cold-blooded thing, it falls on Bucky to maintain his own body heat. 

He hasn't actually looked at the room yet. If he did, he would notice what's unusual about it. 

Two of the four walls, positioned opposite one another, are mirrors. Heavy, deep-set mirrors, built into the wall and framed by ivory rather than being sheets of glass set on top. The other two walls are less remarkable. Just ugly maroon velvet with animal heads - hunting trophies? - set between portraits of handsome hunting dogs. 

Huh. 

It's not especially peculiar, aside from the mirrors and the animal heads. He's not afraid of them, although he can't say his lizard brain enjoys the eerie triple-reflection effect of standing in the center of the room, skin dry and flushed pink from towel friction. He inspects himself. His hair is longer than it's ever been, past his shoulders now. He thinks his eyes might be starting to lose some of the haunt. It won't ever go away entirely, he suspects. Piece by piece, the horrors are lifting from his face. If he ignores the smattering of gray in his unkempt hair and the shadows under his eyes, at the moment, there's more of Barnes than the Soldier in his face. 

_Plink._

Bucky whips his head around. His reflection stares blankly back at him. 

_Plink._

He squints at the mirror. 

 ***

One hour later, exactly one hour past midnight, the Soldier finds a fissure in the glass. He prods once with his metal finger. It widens like a crack in a glacier. 

On the other side of the mirror, Barnes, asleep, twitches, frowning, but doesn't wake. 

The crack splits further. Silent, sinuous, the Soldier sidles sideways through it. He passes through the glass with a sliding, tilting sensation that always occurs at the mouths of holes in continuum. Bucky Barnes doesn't know about that. The Soldier does, because, although they are the same person, they're not. They are separate selves of one man. The mechanics of the Soldier's existence outside of this room are impossible. 

The Soldier observes Barnes, and the first thing he observes is that he's changed. Longer hair than the Soldier's ever was, and the color of it is just beginning to change near the hairline. There are little lines around his eyes. He's less thin than the Soldier, and less hard, and he sleeps like a starfish. 

In no single detail other than the obvious does he resemble the Soldier, and in no single detail does he resembles the Sergeant Barnes of 1945. 

With a voice that is both smoother and louder than Bucky's, the Soldier says "Wake up." 

Bucky startles awake and freezes dead. 

For a moment he just stares at the Soldier, breathing shallowly. His eyes are furious and simultaneously like a deer in headlights. His lip wobbles, and then his mouth wires into a snarl. 

_"You,_ " he says, and there's so much hate in the word. 

"Me," agrees the Soldier, unflustered by being the subject of so much raw loathing. 

Bucky shivers. "You aren't.  _Real."_

The Soldier learned decades ago that "real" is a nebulous term. Having a vague understanding of what this room is, he thinks that "real" might mean nothing at all here. He stays quiet. He is Bucky, and Bucky is him. On some level, they both know it, so he is unconcerned about being attacked. 

"What were you dreaming about?" he says. "Was it a good dream?" 

Bucky sits up, jaw clenched, shirtless, and there's another difference between them. The Soldier, waxed smooth, has no hair on his torso, only gleaming skin over rippling muscle. And scars. Bucky has the muscle but not the gleam. The regular patterns of his body hair are grown in. The Soldier can't imagine that. He has been smooth from neck to navel for as long as he can remember, all the time he's existed. 

"You hate me," the Soldier asserts. 

 ***

Here is the thing. Bucky does hate him. But he doesn't. But he does. 

As the Soldier is observing him, baldly, he looks back. He feels an odd quell in his gut. The Soldier is leaner, younger, silkier. His eyes are large and glossy, swimming with drugs. There is very little emotion behind them. Bucky remembers - from  _being_ him - how clean and uncomplicated it is behind his eyes. In his brain. 

"Why are you here?" Bucky rasps and gropes for a shirt. There's a lump burning in his throat. He'd better not cry. The other thing he remembers from being the Soldier is how much the Soldier hates being faced with tears. 

The Soldier doesn't answer until Bucky has a shirt on. For his own part, the Soldier has none. Only fatigues and boots, and his dark goggles pushed up on his forehead, holding back a mess of sweat-slick mahogany hair, a way they never would have been in life. 

_In life._ The descriptor popped into Bucky's head. As if the Soldier is a ghost. A real ghost, this time. Before (he struggles not to think  _in life_ again) the Winter Soldier, phantom of legend though he was, was never anything but flesh and blood, sweat and meat, bone and iron. 

"You're not real," he says again, calmer. 

The Soldier exhales slowly through his mouth, otherwise silent. 

"Where did you come from?" 

He shakes his head. "I never know." 

"The mirror." Bucky swallows. He should have listened to the man at the desk, he thinks ruefully. Too late for that. 

They are different in every other way. But for a moment, they share the same empty gaze. The Soldier looks Bucky up and down again. "You're not as beautiful, anymore."

_(The memory smacks him. Ten years earlier. The Soldier, half peeling in sunburn, lips covered in dry dust, blood congealed into the lines of his heavy armor. "You got older," he said, flat.)_

"What do you want?" 

The Soldier settles into a crouch. It puts him below Bucky's eye level, most of his body obscured by the bed. It's worse than when he was looming over it. "Nothing. I didn't ask to be here. The mirror. The mirror coughed me out." 

He nods. "Are you going to kill me?"  _Let him try,_ he thinks with more ferocity than he feels. 

"No?" The Soldier blinks, reptilian. "What purpose would killing you serve? You're no threat to me, Barnes." 

Bucky looks down. His hair falls over his face. He imagines death, him killing the Soldier, the Soldier killing him, their twin mismatched hands squeezing the life and the half-life from each other's throats. After testing the metal hand on his own neck, he knows how quickly the spots will take over his vision. Ringing in his ears. Assuming the Soldier won't break his neck or cut any of his major arteries, he would still be dead in a minute. 

How many people, if any, he wonders, have died in this room?

Well. He was warned. 

"So, what?" 

The Soldier shrugs again. His crouch relaxes backward into a sit, plaintive, legs spread, hands meaningless on the floor between them. "We wait for the morning, I suppose." 

There's not a trace of deception on his face, and Bucky would know. 

"Okay?" Bucky ventures. 

The Soldier nods, closing his eyes. He looks so very, very young. "Okay." 

**Author's Note:**

> I have a really nagging feeling that I'm blatantly ripping something off, but I cannot think of what it is. I hope it's not Orphan Black. Anyway, please comment/kudos if you enjoyed, and ignore if you didn't. 
> 
> I'm also on [Tumblr](http://soldatka.tumblr.com/).


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